1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of and an apparatus for formulating a multicomponent drug such as kampo medicine.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As multicomponent materials, for example, there are natural product-originated drugs such as kampo medicines that are drugs (hereinafter, referred to as multicomponent drugs) that are composed of multiple components. The quantitative and qualitative profiles of such drugs change due to a geological factor, an ecological factor, collecting season, a collecting area, a collecting aetas, weather during the growing period, and the like of raw material crude drugs.
Thus, for such multicomponent drugs and the like, predetermined criteria are regulated as qualities for securing the safety and the effectiveness thereof, and national supervising agencies, chemical organizations, manufacturing companies, and the like perform quality evaluations based on the criteria.
Then, a multicomponent drug meeting the criteria for productization is subjected to dosage form processing to produce granules, tablets or the like and thereafter is made into a product through packing.
In general, however, the determination criteria on the quality and the like of a multicomponent drug are set based on the content and the like of one or several distinctive components selected from components in the multicomponent drug.
For example, in 1986. Pharm Tech Japan vol. 28, No. 3, pp 67 to 71, in a case where effective components of a multicomponent drug are not identified, it selects a plurality of components that have physical properties such as a quantitatively analyzability, high water-solubility, a undegradability in hot water, and non-chemical reactability with other components and uses the contents of the components acquired through chemical analysis as evaluation criteria.
In addition, it is well known to apply chromatography to a multicomponent drug, obtain an ultraviolet-visible absorption spectrum for each retention time, and set evaluation criteria based on some pieces of component information included therein.
For example, according to JP 2002-214215 A, some peaks included in HPLC chromatogram data are selected and encoded as barcodes, thereby evaluating a multicomponent drug.
However, in such methods, evaluation targets are limited to a “contents of a specific component” or a “chromatogram peaks of specific components”, and thus only some components contained in a multicomponent drug are set as the evaluation targets. Accordingly, since a multicomponent drug includes many components other than components that are evaluation targets, such methods are insufficient as a method of evaluating a multicomponent drug in terms of accuracy.
In order to accurately evaluate the quality of a multicomponent drug, it is necessary for evaluation to cover information of all peaks or almost all peaks without small peaks corresponding to several %. Accordingly, it is necessary to associate all the peaks or almost all peaks with each other between multicomponent drugs.
However, it is difficult to efficiently associate a plurality of peaks with high accuracy. This interferes with an efficient evaluation of multicomponent drugs with high accuracy.
Described more, crude drugs are natural products, and therefore, multicomponent drugs even which have the same product name may have slightly different components. Hence, even if drugs have the same quality, content ratios of components thereof may be different from each other or a component present in one drug may not be present in the other drug (hereinafter, referred to as an inter-drug error). In addition, there is also a factor that peak intensity or peak elution time in a chromatogram has no precise repeatability (hereinafter, referred to as an analysis error). Accordingly, all peaks or almost all peaks may not be associated with peaks that are originated from the same components between the multicomponent drugs (hereinafter, referred to as peak assignment), thereby interfering with an efficient evaluation with high accuracy.
If quality evaluation of a multicomponent drug can be conducted with high accuracy, it reduces the variation in multicomponent drugs to be subjected to the dosage form processing and the packing. As a result, high-quality multicomponent drugs can be made into products.